Nov 30, 2009

Johnston Press has started experimenting with paywalls. I'm not convinced it's going to be a success if they don't give some thought to what they call the product ...

Leaving aside whether stories about toilets are the sort of must-have content that will motivate people to subscribe, I'm not sure referring to the Northumberland Gazette as the n/a site is very good branding.

The fact the Evening Standard is scrapping its early edition and sticking with a single "West End Final" edition is good news for its sleep-deprived journalists (in the old days they had to file copy by about 7.30am to make the deadline for the first edition).

But might it also be good news for its target audience?

When it announced it was going free, the Standard said it was upping its circulation to cope with an expected increase in demand. So now it's giving away 600,000 free copies instead of selling 250,000 copies at 50p, as it used to.

But as a Londoner who works in the City - not exactly out in the sticks - I've been amazed at how difficult it's been for me to actually get a copy of the paper once I leave the office.

The Standard's distributors start handing out copies from about 4pm. They are pretty much gone by 6pm. In the last two weeks I've noticed that every time I've walked home past Bank tube station (between 6pm and 7pm), there's nobody handing out papers. They've all finished.

So upscale Londoners - the paper's target market - aren't able to get their hands on the paper even if they wanted to. That's a pretty big own-goal and makes me wonder if the paper is reaching the audience the management - and advertisers - expect.

Maybe the single, later edition will mean more papers at peak times - and more left for people like me, commuting home after six o'clock.

Nov 26, 2009

"..why, I wonder, was The Guardian the only national paper to reporton the fact that former News of the World football reporter Matt Driscoll was awarded almost £792,736 for unfair dismissal and disability discrimination by an employment tribunal?"

The one fact of which we can be certain though is they didn't duck it on grounds of newsworthiness. How do we know? Well here's a sample of similar stories with far smaller pay-outs than the News of the World's near-£800,000 pay-out that still made it into the now-silent media. In the case of the first story the pay out was a whopping, er, £0. In the case of the second it was a mighty £9,000:

"...radio 'most influential' medium" said the business-end of the headline, a red rag to those of us who nailed our colours to the media mast marked 'web' some time ago, but a refreshing antidote to recent Twitterstorms and over-analysis of social media sensations such as United Breaks Guitars, where companies have been given a hard time on the interwebs.

A poll of 1,000 opinion leaders found radio had more influence than any other media on corporate reputation. Television came second and print third, while online languished in fourth place...

"Languished" no less.

Polling company Populus spoke to 1,000 chief executives and other business leaders, permanent secretaries across Whitehall and leaders in media and the public sector.

Now, in common with a great many polls this could be a true reflection of the situation. But, especially considering the demographic polled, I'm more inclined to believe all we've really unearthed here is the perception of a very particular group whose disinclination to the web should come as little surprise to anybody. The article also states:

Among print titles, the Fin�ancial Times (FT) was seen to have the most impact on a company's reputation, followed by The Times and The Daily Telegraph.

Nov 23, 2009

Popular tech news site TechCrunch took a swing at the Financial Times today, claiming it scooped a Microsoft / News Corp agreement days before the paper 'revealed' the deal.

"Congratulations to the Financial Times. It’s taken them 10 days and three reporters to confirm our previous story," says the post by TechCrunch's European editor, Mike Butcher. It also adds: "The FT has no other new information that hasn’t been previously reported."

Why is this post particularly interesting? Certainly not because of TechCrunch's baiting of the traditional news outlets and processes. (It does that regularly and seems to thrive on drama - even resulting in its US-based founder saying that he will ignore all news embargoes.)

The key takeaway from this cleverly-written attack is that the deal itself would form the basis of News Corp de-indexing its news articles from Google, making them exclusive to Microsoft's search engine, Bing, as premium content.

This, argues TechCrunch, will see the world of news split into two - 'slow news', churned out by big publishing houses and released at a controlled rate, and sites like its own, which rely on speed. The very deal they are reporting on appears - quite conveniently - to be a prime example of this polarisation already happening.

With the established publishing houses re-evaluating their distribution models and the world of news continuing to accelerate and fragment, TechCrunch is throwing down the gauntlet. While the FT wins on trust, analysis and impartiality against gossipy, unpredictable sites like TechCrunch, the uneasy balance of power might not last for long.

All TechCrunch needs to do is temper that gung-ho approach to journalism to bring it on to the right side of trustworthy. All the traditional news outlets need to do is work out how to deliver content more quickly using a viable online model that doesn't put them out of business...

Following last week's much-criticised behaviour in cheating Ireland out of World Cup qualification, Thierry Henry is now embarking on the inevitable media offensive to limit any damage done to his hand... sorry, brand.

Asked, possibly with some priming, whether he had considered retiring following the universal condemnation of his cheating, Henry replied:

"Oh yes. Friday, when it all went too far, I was very worked up."

But fear not basketball fans, Henry isn't going to be hanging up his cross court pass any time soon.

"Despite everything that has just happened and the fact that I felt let down, I will not let my country down."

(Apart from reducing France's very presence in the World Cup to a single moment of cheating, that is.)

It's a textbook "sympathy please" piece, run in the aftermath of a reputation sinking scandal. How many times have we seen: "I thought about suicide reveals reality TV star", "I nearly drank myself to death says disgraced 80s pop star", "My infidelity cost me my friends and family, reveals shamed MP"... you get the picture, and so did Henry's PR team.

Nov 21, 2009

The Daily Star has been dabbling with 'Le Hand That Rocked The World', The Times went with a rather clumsy 'Hand of Gaul' on Friday's front page, but there was only ever really one Thierry Henry / plucky Irish heartbreak headline that was going to catch the mood.

'Hand of Frog' was the clear winner ...er, hands down.

The question is who got there first? I'd stake a claim for Andrew Stewart in Belfast who tweeted this at 10.13pm, within minutes of Wednesday night's goal:

Kellaway, the newspaper's popular "Agony Aunt", wrote yesterday about a male reader's problem in which the man complained his wife was having an affair with the chief executive of the company where they both worked.

Certainly this was a juicy topic for the FT's highbrow audience and sparked all sorts of City gossip about who could possibly be involved in the moneyed menage a trois.

However, Kellaway has now herself admitted to fabricating the letter, from "Director, male, 50", basing it on a real-life love triangle at insurance giant Aviva.

Her justification: "None of the letters are made up out of the blue, entirely. Seventy-five or 80 per cent of the problems are sent in directly by readers.

"The other ones are based loosely on problems that have either happened to my friends or that I know have occurred."

Kellaway's confession makes you wonder exactly who her advice - "The first thing to do is get a good lawyer" - was aimed at. I'd also be fascinated to know the identity of "Anon, male" who proffered these words of wisdom to the imaginary cuckold: "Try to look on the bright side, You have managed to offload her cheaply and efficiently - she can't exactly use the "poverty" argument when agreeing the divorce settlement, so you can get to keep the house, the car and even the dog."

There has long been speculation that Agony Aunt columns aren't all they are cracked up to be and that perhaps a hard-pressed hack or two might have been press-ganged into action to help beef up the content. (This is certainly something I can confirm knowing of at least one ill-qualified columnist who regularly fabricated reader letters to spice up the normal post bag of tired offerings from the likes of "Depressed of Doncaster" and "Obese of Ormskirk.")

However, to think that the FT of all publications is also prepared to engage in such tabloid tactics is certainly an eye-opener. What next, dear Lucy? A Page Three stunner in the Companies & Markets section?

Fox News could never be accused of subtlety. In fact, it wears its right-of-centre heart on its sleeve, across its chest, in a large graphic behind the newscaster and scrolling across the screen. Just in case you miss the point – and you wouldn't if you were a patriot – the newscasters are there to sledgehammer their message into your nut-like cranium.

Glenn Beck, one of the ace faces on the channel, got particularly carried away this week with his effort to picture patriots squashed under the socialist boot of government. Uttering the kind of simile that would have you asking for your coat and speed dialling a taxi if you dropped it into polite conversation, Beck declared:

"We're the young girl saying 'no, no help me' and the government is Roman Polanski"

Beck has been leading the charge against plans to reform healthcare. Fox News and its followers want to keep the current healthcare schemes in place, with less government interference, even though the current Medicare and Medicaid schemes are also federally administered.

In a desperate push to have the bill defeated the news channel has been promoting anti-healthcare rallies around the country. Some of these were well attended, though perhaps not as well attended as Fox News would have liked, leading the channel to reuse old footage to exaggerate the number of people attending.

Unfortunately the Daily Show's Jon Stewart spotted the duplication, which was picked up in the UK by political blog Liberal Conspiracy, causing Fox's Sean Hannity to issue an apology.

The healthcare rallies saw President Obama compared to Hitler, but the Polanski gaffe signals a new low. Fox News may be asked to apologise again, and rightly so. Beck and his channel have the platform to spark healthy debate on the healthcare, yet they only choose to make sick remarks.

Neil Willis is a former freelancer with experience in the charity and consumer sectors, business to business publishing and national newspapers. He now works for an international news digest

Nov 18, 2009

'The Future of Digital Britain' started late, which seemed very appropriate. Though to be fair to last night's event of that name at the LSE, hosted by media think-tank Polis, it was just a few minutes late in kicking off, unlike the dawdling dawning of a fully-digital Britain, which I still hope to one day witness.

Furthermore, Hunt alluded to the fact a Digital Economy Bill will be part of the Queen's speech today, though he said, having been over the speech with the shadow cabinet we shouldn't hold our collective breath for anything which will effectively or meaningfully address what he believes are the three main roadblocks to digital success in the media world, namely:

Regarding the first point, Hunt said: "We have some of the cheapest broadband in the world, but it's not particularly fast in comparison and if we just sit back the market is not going to do this on its own because the likes of BT only service what consumers want now... trying to solve today's problems, not thinking about tomorrow's."

(Remind me which government privatised BT and made it compete for profit on a quarter-by-quarter basis? ...but I digress.)

Universal Broadband

Controversially, Hunt added that the goal of universal broadband should also be forgone in favour of investing primarily in high-speed broadband in urban areas where content and the lion's share of the economy is based, effectively saying broadband in the regions should be considered a bonus, rather than a necessity for anybody who lives there.

It's a point Big Brother's adoptive father, Peter Bazalgette, agreed with. "The current government thinks more about universality than speed. Speed and an economic stimulus should be the priority."

And once we have this high speed broadband - up to 100Mbps should be our goal - what does that mean for the media? More local news, less regional apparently. Though I assume that means just those local areas that are allowed into the broadband promised land.

"Birmingham, Alabama has nine local television stations," said Hunt. "Birmingham, England has none."

There's much we could learn from the US he insisted, such as the roles of major network affiliate schemes which can help local stations fill their schedules and prop up local news coverage.

And what of the nationals? More video but continued tumbling sales in print was the prognosis.

Hunt sounded confident the quality press could turn a profit from subscription models and increased differentiation through video content.

"I suspect newspapers will adopt a subscription model and if you are a Telegraph subscriber you can get that content on your laptop, Kindle, mobile phone and they can market to you on those devices as a subscriber."

And Hunt said newspapers must remain subject to less strict regulation than television in order to establish their place in the new economy, even if that means them broadcasting online and taking the fight for ad revenue to the broadcasters and into our living rooms as "the chaos of the internet" makes the leap from home PC or laptop to main family television.

And, at the heart of this should be a plan to preserve "the best of what we have" at present, which Hunt said means protecting BBC News in particular. Further investment should also be made in new content by the BBC and Channel 4 he said; suggesting the Tories do still see the value in a licence fee.

But who knows... and that seemed the take-away of an evening big on ifs and buts, coulds and shoulds, but light on anything more meaningful. Perhaps the fact the event was chaired by an LSE professor whose field she professed is "old and new media" suggests the stakeholders in this debate are still undecided themselves about the best way to encourage the inevitable changes within the industry.

Nov 17, 2009

The 3am gossip site - a spin off from the Daily Mirror - has been accused (by me, that is, over at the econsultancy blog) of stuffing their pages with keywords to rank better in Google.

This is despite claiming that they aren't interested in search engine optimisation and would rather build a loyal audience.

For instance, this story has a headline of "And the celeb winners of this week's 3am.co.uk Bleaties are ..." whereas the title (which is not visible on the page but is used by google to decide what a page is about) has been stuffed with the following keywords:

jordan katie price peter andre jedward x factor simon cowell

And this story, headline "Looks like Simon's wallet won this one" has this title:

The Sun celebrates its 40th birthday today in its own inimitable way. A fulsome pat on its own back in the leader column titled "40 years of people power", an eight-page pull-out on its "greatest front pages" and what could be sensationally dubbed a blatant contempt of court on its front page - allegedly.

The newspaper's report on the arrest of Delroy Grant by police probing the "Night Stalker" attacks on pensioners was billed as an exclusive - obviously ticking the box for a "big" splash to mark the anniversary.

However, as Grant has been charged with five rapes, six indecent assaults and 11 burglaries and appeared before Greenwich magistrates, the media is severely circumscribed on what it can report so future proceedings are not prejudiced. The Magistrates Court Act of 1980 states report details should include the name, age and address of the accused, the charges they face, identity of the court, the names of the legal representatives, whether or not legal aid or bail has been granted and date and place of any adjournment. Nowhere does it allow for character judgements on suspects, who, let's not forget, are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

That's why The Sun's report featuring quotes from Grant's ex-wife branding him a violent bully who attacked her while in labour may possibly be interpreted as being slightly over the top.

There has been a lot of debate in media circles about the relevance of contempt of court laws especially as newspapers frequently flout them and get away with it. Compare The Sun's coverage of the Grant case with that of the Press Association, which did stick to the rules, and you will see the point being made.

The Sun may well argue that the time lag between its report today and any eventual trial of Grant may be so long that there is little risk of prejudicing the case. However, it would be interesting to see what his lawyers make of it.

Either laws are there to be enforced or not and The Sun is normally one of the first on the scene calling for instant justice when an apparent breach has been committed. Somehow though, I don't see Wapping executives missing their 40th birthday bash for a spell in Pentonville.

Nov 16, 2009

The Sun and Daily Mail recently indulged in a gross breach of the privacy of Steve Nutt - son of Professor David Nutt, the recently sacked government scientific adviser.

They accused him of taking drugs and being obsessed with terrorism, on the basis of his Facebook page.

Here's what the PCC Code has to say about privacy:

i) Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications.

ii) Editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual's private life without consent. Account will be taken of the complainant's own public disclosures of information.

There seemed no justification for these stories - other than an attempt to stick the knife into an academic who the papers disagreed with on drugs policy. The Sun attempted to pretend that the information wasn't private by claiming the pictures "can be seen freely by anyone in what is called the "Bristol network" (so not available to most people then).

Nov 15, 2009

Those searching for spiritual enlightenment may soon be able to search the internet for guidance if the Roman Catholic church follows the advice of a French bishop, who urged the Church to: leave its ghetto and recognise the importance and reach of the internet.

Despite a claim to be omnipresent, God is as yet relatively underexposed on the web, prompting Monsignor Jean-Michel Di Falco, the Bishop of Gap, France, to add:

By not being present on the web, you cut yourself off from a large part of people's lives. Pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, lay people - with the internet we enter a marketplace, a free and spontaneous space where everything is said about everything, where everyone can debate everything."

Even though Monsignor Di Falco almost undid his good work by referring to the web as 'planet internet' - the kind of remark that shows a speaker is as out of step with current trends as a geography teacher at a sixth-form disco - his thoughts seem even more sensible when you consider a simple web search on British Bishop Richard Williamson could have spared the church some embarrassment.

The Monsignor's request does not seem to have fallen on deaf ears as The European Episcopal Commission for Media, a Swiss-based Vatican agency, has invited representatives from Facebook, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia to this year's meeting. It might not be long before @God has even more followers than @stephenfry.

Neil Willis is a former freelancer with experience in the charity and consumer sectors, business to business publishing and national newspapers. He now works for an international news digest

Stephen Pritchard is the readers' editor in question and he writes about the crippling fall in advertising to have afflicted Guardian News & Media: revenues down £33m in six months.

In times past it fell to others to write gleefully about their rival's distress, while the newspaper in question would be in silent denial.

Sure, Pritchard rallies the troops with three paragraphs of "good news" towards the end of the piece but not before he notes:

These are painful times here. Not so long ago, the Observer looked threatened with closure as losses across both titles reached a frightening £100,000 a day. Mercifully, that threat has receded, but the price of survival is a high one. Three of the four monthly magazines – Observer Woman, Observer Sport Monthly and Observer Music Monthly – must close, leaving only Observer Food Monthly still being published.

Whatever your opinion of them (and they were always controversial), these monthly magazines gave the Observer a distinction that marked it out from the other Sundays. The loss of their crackling creativity will undoubtedly affect circulation, but they were cripplingly expensive to produce; major surgery was necessary if the heart of the Observer was to keep beating.